Reclaiming History (43 page)

7:28 p.m.

FBI agent Manning C. Clements steps into the homicide office and spots fellow agent James Bookhout. Clements has been at police headquarters since one o’clock when, under instructions from his supervisor, he had offered the assistance of the FBI in the investigation of the president’s assassination. For the last several hours he has been acting as a liaison, relaying instructions to the other agents on the premises.
⁷⁹⁰

Clements approaches Bookhout and asks if anyone from the bureau has gotten a detailed physical description of Oswald, and more importantly, questioned him in depth about his background. Bookhout tells him no (though Captain Fritz
has
obtained some background information on Oswald), and suggests that Clements do it. Clements seeks out Captain Fritz and asks if there is any objection to his interviewing Oswald to get this information.

“I’ve got no objection,” Fritz says.

Clements enters Captain Fritz’s office and finds Oswald seated and two detectives—Hall and Boyd—standing guard nearby.
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The FBI agent introduces himself, shows Oswald his credentials, advises him of his right to an attorney, and explains his purpose for being there. Oswald is slightly haughty, but cooperative. Clements proceeds to elicit biographical information from Oswald—date and place of birth, height, weight, and other personal data. He then turns to the obviously fictitious Selective Service card found in Oswald’s wallet.

Clements can tell the card is a fake because of the photograph mounted on it, something not contained on an authentic Selective Service card, and the number of obvious erasures made in typing the information on it. Besides, the card is in the name of “Alek James Hidell,” but bears Oswald’s photograph.
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Asked about the purpose of the card, Oswald refuses to answer.

Ten minutes into the interview, the door to the office opens and Detective Sims tells the agent that Oswald is needed downstairs.
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They lead Oswald once again out into the crush of reporters. Flashbulbs pop and questions are hurled in waves at the prisoner as reporters press in. As the detectives struggle to move Oswald toward the jail elevators, Oswald seizes the moment to exploit his situation.

“These people here have given me a hearing without legal representation,” Oswald, referring to his arraignment, says into a microphone shoved in his direction.

“Did you shoot the president?” a reporter asks.

“I didn’t shoot anybody,” Oswald replies. “No, sir.”
⁷⁹⁴

7:30 p.m. (8:30 p.m. EST)

At the Bethesda Naval Hospital, a hot white light illuminates the hands of the two pathologists huddled over the body of the late president. In the interests of time, Dr. Humes decided not to wait for Lieutenant Colonel Finck to arrive at Bethesda. Instead, he and Dr. Boswell set about the task of recovering the two largest bullet fragments seen in the X-rays of the president’s skull. The hole in the right side of the head was immense (over five inches in its greatest diameter), making access to the brain relatively easy. Portions of the skull, literally shattered by the force of the bullet, fall apart in the hands of the two pathologists as they try to reach the minute fragments behind the right eye and near the back of the skull.
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Both are recovered, placed into a glass jar with a black metal top, and turned over later in the evening to FBI agents for transport to the FBI laboratory.
⁷⁹⁶
*
To remove the brain, Humes and Boswell use a scalpel to extend the lacerations of the scalp downward toward the ears. Normally, a saw would be used to cut the skullcap and remove the brain. Here, the damage is so devastating that the doctors can lift the brain out of the head without recourse to a saw.
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The left hemisphere of the brain is intact, while the damage to the right one is massive.
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Just as the brain is fixed in formalin for further study, Lieutenant Colonel Finck walks into the autopsy room wearing military pants and a green scrub suit.
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The three autopsy surgeons begin an examination of the president’s head wound. What is immediately obvious to all three is a small oval-shaped hole in the back of the president’s scalp. Peeling the skin away from the skull, the doctors find a corresponding but larger hole in the bone beneath the scalp. From inside the skull, the area surrounding the hole is cratered. From the outside, the skull bone around the hole is smooth. The surgeons recognize the wound to the backside of the head as having all the characteristics of an entrance wound.
⁸⁰⁰

After taking photographs of the outer layer (“table”) of the skull at the entrance wound, the photographer, John Stringer, positions himself at the head of the table. It is difficult to properly illuminate the inside layer or table of the back of the skull, in order to record the cratering effect the doctors have observed, so the doctors hold the head up slightly while Stringer snaps several exposures looking down into the cranial cavity.
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As to the massive hole on the right side of the president’s head, it is presumably the result of the bullet exiting the head, although no specific exit point in the margins of the defect is discovered.
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7:45 p.m.

FBI agent James Hosty pulls out of the police garage and heads back toward the Dallas FBI field office. Oswald’s words still resonate in his head, “Oh, so
you’re
Hosty. I’ve heard about you. You’re the one who’s been harassing my wife!” Hosty couldn’t help but think of the two visits he had paid Marina Oswald, the two visits that Oswald was clearly referring to. Hosty hadn’t given the visits, or Lee Oswald for that matter, a lot of thought. Oswald was, after all, only one of the forty or fifty cases that made up his normal caseload.

Hosty had remembered reading a front-page article in the Dallas newspapers in 1959 about a former marine, Lee Oswald, who had defected to the Soviet Union. The article also grabbed the attention of Fort Worth FBI agent John Fain, who opened the case file in an effort to determine if Oswald posed any national security risks. In early June 1962, the Dallas newspapers ran another article, this time reporting that Oswald was returning to the United States with a Russian bride. Fain interviewed Oswald twice, in June and August of 1962, and the following month, after concluding that Oswald was not a security risk, closed the file on Oswald. Hosty inherited all of Fain’s case files.

Because Hosty had reviewed Marina’s records at the Immigration and Naturalization Service office in Dallas for Fain, he had an uneasy feeling that she could possibly be a Soviet intelligence agent, and decided to try to locate the Oswalds, particularly after learning that Lee Oswald had subscribed to a U.S. Communist paper after Fain closed the file. But they had left no forwarding address when they moved from the last address he had on them, Neely Street in Dallas. He later learned they had moved to New Orleans, and shortly after being informed months later by the New Orleans FBI office that the Oswalds had disappeared from New Orleans, Hosty’s Dallas office received a communiqué that Oswald, while in Mexico City in early October 1963, had visited the Soviet embassy there and spoken to one Valeriy Kostikov, a vice counsel at the embassy.

Eventually, the FBI’s New Orleans office sent Hosty what was believed to be the Oswalds’ new address at Ruth Paine’s home in Irving, Texas, and asked that he verify their presence before it transfers the case file back to his jurisdiction.

On Friday, November 1, 1963, Hosty stopped at the Paine residence. Ruth Paine told him that Mrs. Oswald and her two children were living with her, and that Mrs. Oswald was temporarily separated from Lee, who visited his wife and children on weekends. Paine knew Oswald was working at the Texas School Book Depository and living somewhere in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, but she wasn’t quite sure where.

While they were talking, Marina came into the room. She looked as though she had been napping. Through her body language, Hosty could see she was frightened and he didn’t try to interview her that day. He did intend to later, but he needed some of the materials from the Oswald file, which he had not yet gotten from New Orleans, to do it properly. He told Marina through Ruth that he would come back to see her at a later time. Ruth Paine told Hosty that she would find out where Lee was living and let him know.

On November 5, Hosty and a fellow agent dropped by Ruth Paine’s again. The two agents chatted with Mrs. Paine briefly while standing at the front door. Ruth still didn’t have Lee’s address, and the only new information she volunteered was that Lee had described himself to her as a Trotskyist Marxist. They had been there less than five minutes and didn’t see Marina until they were about to leave. Neither of the agents said anything to her.

Having confirmed that both Marina and Lee were living in the Dallas area, Hosty was waiting for the FBI’s New Orleans office to send him copies of their entire file at the time of the assassination.
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As he pulls into the FBI’s parking area, Hosty shakes his head and wonders how it could have come to this. What could he have possibly done differently that might have prevented the assassination? His actions concerning the Oswald file might be explainable, but Hosty knows it won’t do his career any good.

Hosty heads up to his office, where a secretary tells him that he is wanted in Gordon Shanklin’s office, pronto. Hosty finds his supervisor, Ken Howe, waiting there with Shanklin. They tell him to shut the door.

“What the hell is this?” Shanklin asks, clutching what appears to be a letter.

Hosty takes it and immediately recognizes it as the anonymous note delivered ten days or so earlier, the note he now realized had been delivered by Oswald.

“It’s no big deal,” Hosty says, trying to shrug it off. “Just your typical guff.”

“What do you mean, ‘typical guff’? This note was written by Oswald,” Shanklin screams, “the probable assassin of the president, and Oswald brought this note into
this
office just ten days ago! What the hell do you think Hoover’s going to do if he finds out about this note?” Shanklin is more upset than Hosty can remember, pacing behind his desk, puffing a cigarette.

Hosty again tries to convince Shanklin that the note is not a big deal, that Oswald hadn’t threatened the president. But Shanklin knows much more will be made of the note.

“If people learn that Oswald gave you guff a week before the assassination, they’ll say you should have known he’d kill the president,” Shanklin cries. “If Hoover finds out about this, he’s going to lose it.”

Howe looks on gravely, arms folded. Hosty pleads that once they explain everything, the note, the background of the case, everyone will understand that there was no way in hell anyone could have guessed that Oswald was going to kill anyone, much less the president. Shanklin rubs his neck, unconvinced. Finally, he orders Hosty to write a memo surrounding the circumstances of the note.

Hosty returns a short while later with a two-page memo and hands it to Shanklin, with the note. The agent-in-charge shoves it into his “Do Not File” desk drawer, that special place in Hoover’s FBI where every special agent in charge of an FBI field office kept personal notes on all his agents. The material in the drawer never enters the official record, and gives Hoover “plausible deniability” if anything objectionable ever reaches the public eye.
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7:50 p.m.

The assembly room in the basement of City Hall is once again abuzz with activity, as officers prepare for the third lineup. In the holdover area, adjacent to the stage, Detectives Sims, Boyd, Hall, and H. M. Moore arrange and handcuff the men who will appear with Oswald in the lineup. This time a pair of city prisoners have been included—Richard Walter Borchgardt, held for carrying a prohibited weapon and investigation of burglary and theft, and Ellis Carl Brazel, in custody for failing to pay some long-overdue traffic tickets. Borchgardt takes the number 1 position, Oswald is 2, Brazel is 3, and Don Ables, the jail clerk who participated in the first two lineups, takes the fourth spot.
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Detectives C. W. Brown and C. N. Dhority accompany sisters-in-law Barbara and Virginia Davis into the darkened end of the assembly room and have them sit down. The women, who haven’t seen pictures of Oswald in the evening paper or on television, are nervous.
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In a moment or two, Secret Service agents Forrest Sorrels and Winston Lawson, who had tracked Brennan down at his home, escort Howard Brennan into the room. The construction worker is petrified that he is the only witness who saw the gunman firing from the sixth-floor window and could give a fair description of him,
*
and over the last few hours has convinced himself that he may be putting his family in danger by stepping forward and identifying him. “Howard, I’m afraid, we don’t know who might be out there looking for you,” his wife, Louise, had said when he returned home earlier in the day, around three o’clock, and told her, “Louise, I was there. I saw him do it. I saw the man shoot President Kennedy. It was the most terrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Brennan thinks of moving his wife, daughter, and grandson, who was living with them at the time, out of town, but Louise seems to think there is no way to really get away.
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Brennan is looking for a way out of his predicament.

“I don’t know if I can do you any good or not because I have seen the man that they have under arrest on television,” Brennan told Sorrels when he first arrived at the police station. He adds, “I just don’t know if I can identify him positively or not.”
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As they walk into the assembly room, Brennan tells Sorrels that he would like to get back a ways and view the man from a distance, closer to what it was at the time of the shooting. “We will get you clear on to the back,” Sorrels says, “and then we can move up forward.”
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The signal is given and the detectives begin marching the prisoners under the bright lights of the stage. As soon as Oswald appears, and before each man has even settled under a number, the Davis women react.
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